In its short history, Australia has a long history of ''dreamers'' - from Alfred Deakin to Lang Hancock, Bob Katter and Alan Jones - wanting to do things to the outback. We've got such a big, dry country and we're not using it all! And thanks to concerns about urban sprawl and traffic jams, this is not the first time someone has suggested that, perhaps, Australians should live somewhere other than Sydney or Melbourne.

The Coalition plan to divert foreign aid back onto home soil was seen as particularly contentious on Thursday. But even here, we have to remind ourselves Labor has announced that $375 million of aid will be spent processing asylum seekers in Australia (although, Foreign Minister Bob Carr assures us, this is completely different).

Of course, the other part of the draft plan was the idea that substantial and relevant chunks of the public service - such as the CSIRO - would be moved north ''to key urban zones''.

In part, this would be to boost the population and development. But it also feeds into an idea that federal public servants are not useful doing what they do, where they do it.

In his address to the National Press Club last week, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott observed: ''As a cabinet minister, I often noticed how the public servants who were making the rules very rarely had to live under those rules themselves. Treasury officials weren't in business. Health officials never had to treat patients. Education officials didn't run schools. Of course, they were conscientiously doing their best, but there was often a gulf between their thinking and that of the people whose lives they shaped.''

(Never mind the fact that there's not much need for surgical training if you're running the secretariat of a committee or writing a policy brief. And that with the doctor shortage, it would be an absolute waste to have a GP managing a departmental branch. I digress.)

Abbott's musings also tie into Gina Rinehart's argument that the public service should become more decentralised.

''Why, for instance, does our Department of Aboriginal Affairs [usually referred to as FaHCSIA] even need to reside in Canberra? Why not in a more central location such as Alice Springs, for instance?'' she wrote in Australian Resources and Investment magazine last year.

''And why do we need our Defence Department in Canberra? What's wrong with our Defence Department being stationed in our north?''

In more colloquial speak, you may have heard of the ''Canberra bubble''. The notion that Canberra is some sort of cyborg city, hermetically sealed from the rest of Australia and its experiences.

That bubble theory is partly to do with the fact that Canberra is planned and plonked in the middle of a sheep plain. And partly to do with the fact that it is the national capital, so it is full of politicians, hacks, flacks and public servants. Therefore, the logic goes, people in Canberra have no idea of what life is like in the ''real world'', because goodness knows it isn't here.

I have long felt frustrated (ie, heartily annoyed) about the Canberra bubble. Not because it doesn't exist, but because it suggests that everywhere else is bubble-free.

If you had major components of the public service living in Karratha, they would inevitably begin to see life from a northern West Australian perspective. People would make jokes about West Pilbara Coast shiny bums, cut off from actual Australia.

The bubble theory also suggests that Canberrans aren't real people, with real issues. Like they don't get sick, pay tax, drink bad coffee, have kids in school and parents in nursing homes. Yes, there is not much traffic here, but that doesn't make it an alternate universe.

There are also advantages to housing much of the public service in Canberra (mindful that it's not all in the ACT). Isn't the buzzword of 21st century best practice public servicing ''whole-of-government''? Spread the APS out across the country and how long before we get complaints about how much taxpayer money is being spent on airfares and long-distance calls between agencies?

If people are providing advice to the government, then it makes stark raving sense that they are located nearby. And if they are supposed to be making policies for the entire nation, it isn't bubblish, but sensible that they do this in a central - even neutral - spot.

Besides, everyone knows that if Canberra or the public service were to move anywhere, it should be Merimbula.

Judith Ireland is a Fairfax journalist who used to be a Canberra public servant.